Communicators Guide

Introduction

“Communication is the essential life blood of the organization life.”
— Ann Harriman

Communicators fill a unique role. We are career employees who are part journalist and part flack. Although we usually serve as advocates for journalism and a free press, we are not considered working journalists. Many times, our bosses don’t want to trust us with sensitive information, because, after all, we often talk to reporters and correspondents.

Communicators have to negotiate the bureaucracy while translating gobbledegook into plain language. We are the ones who put news releases, publications, and Web sites to the test. If we can understand it, then perhaps the public—our customers—will greet our products by saying: “This is from the government. I’ll be able to understand it.”

Founded in 1996, the Federal Communicators Network, www.fcn.gov, has almost 900 members who are involved in disseminating information within and outside government. Our membership includes writers, editors, public affairs specialists, program managers, analysts, speech writers, Web masters, artists, photographers, graphic artists, and librarians. With this range of talent and expertise, we set out to create a guidebook for both new and seasoned communicators.

This guidebook, written, edited, and published by members of the Federal Communicators Network and other communicators, is our attempt to:

• offer some general guidance for other federal, state, regional, and local communicators;
• compile a list of sources and resources to help communicators refine and sharpen their skills; and
• improve the trust between government and the public by helping us communicate clearly to the public and by making government’s message relevant to our customers.

Marci Hilt
Project Manager

Are you a bureaucrat? You might be if...

• Your FTE can’t find the RFP on the IRP and the CRP for the EPA and the NWS or—even without the CDAs—the JIB and CENTCOM PAQ briefing shows there are 9 KIA, 6 WIA, and 2 MIA.
• An agency reorganization would negatively impact your functional capabilities to provide essential services.
• You ask for comments from interested people, but never tell those who aren’t interested where to send theirs.
• You use your compensatory time to study beach renourishment in a coastal management area, rather than taking a vacation at the seaside.
• When someone asks you what you do for a living, you say you “develop and implement policy.”
• There are pavement deficiencies in the streets, rather than potholes.
• Your program depopulates animals with contagious diseases, rather than killing them.
• Your agency repositions, reduces duplications, focuses reductions, downsizes, right-sizes, out-sources human resources, or talks about the human side of downsizing, rather than firing or laying off employees.
• You used the words program and procedure more than 100 times each in your annual report.
• You’re politically correct, but your temperamentally challenged supervisor thinks you have an attitudinal impairment and an intellectual deficiency.
• Moral: Not only does relying on jargon give you a wrong image—it makes you hard to understand. Use Plain Language (www.plainlanguage.gov).

“We can lick gravity, but the paperwork is overwhelming.”
— Wernher von Braun